Buddhist History of the West, A

Buddhism teaches that to become happy, greed, ill-will, and delusion must be transformed into their positive counterparts: generosity, compassion, and wisdom. The history of the West, like all histories, has been plagued by the consequences of greed, ill-will, and delusion. A Buddhist History of the West investigates how individuals have tried to ground themselves to make themselves feel more real. To be self-conscious is to experience ungroundedness as a sense of lack, but what is lacking has been understood differently in different historical periods. Author David R. Loy examines how the understanding of lack changes at historical junctures and shows how those junctures were so crucial in the development of the West.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Toward a Buddhist Perspective

If our sense of self is a construct, as Buddhism and contemporary psychology
agree, it is also ungrounded. This book is about the ways we have tried
to ground ourselves, to make ourselves feel more real. To be self-conscious
is to experience our ungroundedness as a sense of lack, but what we are
lacking has been understood differently in different historical periods. The...

One. The Lack of Freedom

The growth of freedom has been the central theme of history, Lord
Acton believed, because it represents God’s plan for humanity. One
does not need such a Whiggish view of history to notice that the
history of the West, at least, has indeed been a story of the development
of freedom, whether actualized or idealized. We trace the origins of...

Two. The Lack of Progress

The more we learn about other civilizations, the more anomalous the
West seems. If we resist the presumption that Western culture is the
growing tip of social evolution, to be contrasted with the stagnation of
most non-Western ones, what becomes highlighted is its dynamism, for
better and worse. Rather than trying to account for the “undevelopment”...

Three. The Renaissance of Lack

If history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken, as James
Joyce’s Daedalus put it, what gives that nightmare its power over us?
Perhaps it began as a daydream more attractive than the pain of being
human—until the dream took on a life of its own and we became trapped
in our own objectifications. Then the key to this puzzle is why we prefer...

Four. The Lack of Modernity

Our economic system promotes and requires greed in at least two
ways: desire for profit is necessary to fuel the engine of economic
growth, and consumers must be insatiable in order to maintain markets
for what can be produced. Although justified as raising standards of
living worldwide, economic globalization seems rather to be increasing...

Five. The Lack of Civil Society

Civil society has become an urgent topic, unfortunately. We do not
usually notice things until they are broken, and the increasing attention
of public leaders and scholars1 is a sign that ours is in trouble. Everyone
seems to agree that a strong civil society is essential for healthy democracy,
which would be unremarkable except (as we shall see) there is no...

Six. Preparing for Something That Never Happens

Yeats died in 1939. Today in Japan, where I write this book, toddlers
take entrance exams to get into the “best” kindergartens, because the
best kindergartens help you get into the best primary schools, which
help you get into the best middle schools, which help you get into the
best high schools, which help you get into the best universities, which...

Seven. The Religion of the Market

Religion is notoriously difficult to define. If, however, we adopt a
functionalist view and understand religion as what grounds us by teaching
us what this world is, and what our role in the world is, then it
becomes evident that traditional religions are fulfilling this role less and
less, because that function is being supplanted by other belief system...

Afterword: The Future of Lack

Freedom, progress, fame, romance, money, the nation-state, corporate
capitalism, mechanistic science, civil society, consumerism: hardly
new themes, but this inquiry into the origins of our preoccupation
with them casts them in a different light. My lack approach has not
attempted a “balanced” evaluation that weighs the positive against the...

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